“Yes.”
A melancholy oppression of anticlimax lay over Myal. He traced the patterns on the instrument, but felt no inclination to play it. A silence widened between them. The whole earth was silent where the ghostly clangour of the town had been before. A light wind flapped over the hill and brushed the tops of the forest, but it made hardly any sound, only the sound of emptiness. Even the resins of the forest did not smell so high up, or else the uncanny spot had sucked its perfumes away, eating the life force of the trees, the hill, the land, as it ate the life force of living men who wandered, or were coerced, inside the gates.
“I spent the night,” Myal said at last, “with Ciddey Soban. We didn’t—I don’t want you to think—”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“All right. But she told me. The link that’s keeping her on earth. If I tell you, I want your word you won’t harm her.”
“Harm?”
“Won’t throw her out of this world. Not until she’s ready.”
“You can guess what my word is worth.”
“I’ll trust you.”
“No, you don’t trust me. Something’s puzzling you, and you want to tell me so it will puzzle you less. That’s all. And you’re prepared to betray Ciddey Soban to me for that.”
“She wants to kill you.”
“She shouldn’t be strong enough yet to try.”
“She’s very strong. She’s used your energy too, to draw on through me. A ghost-killer’s life force must be particularly restorative for a ghost. And she was a witch, too.”
“You underestimate your own psychic force. She didn’t need me. And you don’t get my word.”
Myal gnawed a blade of grass he had found he was after all able to pluck. “I’ll tell you anyway. I still have the advantage. You’ll see why.”
“Because presumably,” said Dro, “Ciddey’s link is located on that instrument I just handed back to you.”
Myal frowned, thunder stolen.
“You’re so intelligent. Know where?”
“I’d thought about the inset ivory,” said Dro, “but so far as I know, she never lost any bones.”
“Not a bone,” said Myal. “A tooth. A milk tooth. She fell as a baby, and it got knocked out. She was just a year old.”
Myal took another deep breath that was pointless. The absurdity of the story upset him, how two of the guidelines of his life had rested on lies.
“Old Soban kept Ciddey’s tooth. Superstition. Then he had a chance to sell something. He was always trying to sell things, heirlooms, furniture, for drink. He was a drunkard, like my sot of a father. That’s probably how they met. In some inn. Didn’t care about being landowner mixing with travelling rubbish, then, drinking each other under the stinking table. Then Soban got my bloody stink of a father interested in buying a unique musical instrument. It came from some foreign country. No one could play it. That was true enough. My drunken boss-eyed father went to Soban’s house, took one look at the instrument, and thought he, being a genius, could master it, and make a fortune. He’d get ideas like that sometimes. So he felt the instrument over, businesslike, and plunked away on the wires, and blew down the reed. And then he said he’d buy it, but there was a bit of ivory missing out of the inlay. What’d Soban take off the asking price?”
“To which,” said Dro, staring at the lake, “Soban replied he could replace the ivory. And he took the thing upstairs and got the milk tooth and rammed it into the wood where the hole was.”
“That’s it. Ciddey knows, because her father made a great history out of it. She said it shamed her. Till I came back on the same road my father did, and it turned out so useful for her.”